This paper critically examines how South Africa's Mathematics and Mathematical Literacy curricula address the area of probability, and points to the need to re-examine curricular goals and teaching methods in this regard. The paper argues that the emphasis in these curricula on teaching and assessing probability through games of chance, tree diagrams, and related aspects of classical probability lead to a neglect of many important aspects of real-world probabilities and their associated language of chance. The paper analyses several illustrative examples for probability in socially meaningful situations, examines the role of literacy factors in communicating about probability, and presents conclusions pertaining to instruction and needed research.
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Iddo Gal (2009) studied this question.